Interview with Richard Gere

Share.

The star of Unfaithful on his new flick, Tibet, Diane Lane, and intimacy.

By Steven Horn

We recently caught up with Richard Gere during a roundtable promoting Unfaithful, the new film directed by Adrian Lyne dealing with an affair's effect on a marriage.Unfaithful has a trick ending, rather an unexpected ending. How important is it to guard that secret? Says Gere: "There are probably three plots in all of literature and drama so you get the drift, like in Shakespeare, you get the drift about where it's going pretty early but I think to give away an ending is foolish. You can assume from the way the film is being promoted that there are three people and there is some kind of affair but I certainly don't want to tell what happens."How did Gere come to this project? "I had read the script before an agent was involved. It was kind of sitting there at Fox and it was one of those pictures, one of those scripts, that they weren't quite sure how to make. It was extremely literate, by Alvin Sargeant, one of our best writers, who does very textured scripts. It was a good script and had things that resonated with me for years before I had met Adrian. I remembered very specifically. I was aware of changes that had been made during development but I think they weren't sure how to make it. Was it going to be a $10 million film or a $50 million film? Obviously when Adrian came in, they decided to go for a larger audience. I think the thing we were all concerned about was 'Do we want to dumb down the story to make it work for a larger audience?'"Gere on some of the themes explored in the movie: "What is intimacy? What is a relationship? How do you keep relationships alive and honest? Are relationships like sharks and you have to keep them in motion? Do you have to keep getting into deeper and deeper water to make them alive? I think you do. That's what this couple finds out. Without giving the plot away, they are much closer at the end of the movie than they were at the beginning. [They are] much more revealed to each other, much less protecting. They are just wide open with each other. I think that's the way you have to go. I don't think you have to go through what these people went through to get there but for any of us to breakthrough, it takes work and courage. Unfortunately, there is pain in growth."And the ending? "There was a more enigmatic ending. It was still in front of the police station but it wasn't telling the audience what the next step was. It was a more poetic ending. Films are an odd creature, you never know what's going to communicate, how fast the information gets across, how fast the emotion gets across, and so it's a very fluid enterpise making a film. So with the knowledge of that, when we got to shoot that last scene, Adrian said, 'Would you mind doing this or that,' and I said, 'Yeah we can try that.' So we tried one thing and that turned out to be the ending that is in the film now. After I did it, I came back and said, 'That's the ending.' That felt right to me and it bore out when we saw it on film, it seemed to be the best way to do it."

Diane Lane and Richard Gere in Unfaithful

In the film, there is a dramatic moment when Gere's character realizes his wife is lying to him. "You feel those things, you don't exactly know what it is, but you know there's a change of direction in the wind. I don't know that he knew exactly what was going on but he knew he was in a different universe that day. It just came up his back. I think we've all been in those situations, whether they are about betrayal in this sense, or betrayal in another sense. We don't know exactly where they come from but it's our inner selves talking to us. They're saying, 'Wake up, wake up.' So he was getting a wake-up call. What I find the most interesting about him and his question of intimacy was that is was easier for him to go to a private detective to have his wife followed than it was to confront her. I think that is a tell-tale sign about the lack of ultimate intimacy between these two people."Unfaithful is the second pairing of Diane Lane and Richard Gere; the first being Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 crime drama The Cotton Club. How has Lane changed? "I don't think we morph into totally different people. I don't think we lose who we were. The person I knew eighteen years ago certainly was there but there was also the woman who has been married, divorced, who has a kid and everything else, lost her father in the meantime, so [she was] a richer personality for sure. Diane is one of those people, one of those actors, who are in their body, solidly in the body and was at 19 or 20 when I worked with her. She hasn't lost that but there has certainly been a wealth of experience that has happened in the meantime and I'm sure she'd say the same about me. She was a joy to work with. You can't do a film like this without trusting who you are working with, you've got to be wide open and not be watching your back. So this was a very trusting situation between Diane and myself and Olivier also just jumped in. It was a very trusting place to be and I think it was because Diane and I knew each other. Adrian obviously also created a situation where people felt safe and also necessary to push the limits. We would be doing 20, 30 takes sometimes, tough emotional stuff and we may have very well used the first take but it was always searching, 'Is there more here to get out of this?' So the agenda for all of us was to take a voyage, you sign on and decide to make it as honest and revealing of people as you honestly can."Gere has long been an advocate for human rights, specifically for the people of Tibet. "I didn't ask for this frankly, it ended up being my life because my friends were being abused. When I first started studying with Tibetan masters, I didn't know what the situation was in Tibet, no one in the world knew outside of Asia. Even in India, they didn't know what was going on, they had these refugees there but they didn't know what the story was. So [my speaking out] was to protect what had become my family at that point, to talk about this issue, but that was already twenty years ago. As someone who has been in that community, been in Asia, been in the refugee camps and for the last 10 years not allowed in China or Tibet because I talk about those things, because I have spoken at human rights commissions around the world, the Senate, and the House, Geneva, Strausborg, it is area where I am considered one of the experts, for good or worse. For twenty years, it has been my backyard so I felt a certain responsibility to talk about it."